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Back in October, Google ended software support for the original and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats. On the surface, that doesnt seem totally unreasonable, considering those original devices are roughly 14 years old at this point. If you have one, you can still use it as a thermostat, but it will no longer connect to the internet. As a result, you cant connect to it using the Nest or Google Home apps. That may not seem like a big deal, except that the single greatest thing about using a Nest Thermostat wasnt the fact that it would learn your habits and create routines, or that it would detect when youre not home and adjust accordingly. No, the best thing about using a Nest Thermostat was that you could open the app and turn on the furnace before you headed home from the company Christmas party. The best thing about Nest was that it took the single most boring thing in your home and made it smart. The problem is, those devices are still working just fine. In many homes, the hardware works exactly as well as it did the day it was installed. I know this to be true because ours is one of them. We have a second-generation Nest Learning Thermostat and the only thing wrong with it is that Google decided to kill its absolute best feature. The smart-home dream Nest was started in 2011 by Tony Fadell, whose primary design accomplishment before that was inventing the iPod. The idea was simpletake the most boring household hardware device and turn it into magic. The original Nest Learning Thermostat was both incredibly well designed and also magically smart. It learned user behavior, saved energy, and looked good doing it. Nest quickly became the most recognizable name in the beginning days of the smart-home market. Google bought Nest in 2014 for $3.2 billion, signaling how important the company believed the connected home would become. For a while, Nest operated semi-independently, expanding into products such as smoke detectors, cameras, and doorbells. Eventually, Google folded Nest back into its hardware division. That shift brought tighter integration with Google Assistant and a unified smart-home platform, but it also marked the end of Nest as a standalone brand with its own roadmap. Google changes direction Over the past decade, Google has reworked the Nest lineup into a broader Home ecosystem. Some early devices aged out as the company consolidated platforms, rewrote its smart-home APIs, and shifted from Works With Nest to Works With Google Home. Support challenges for aging hardware, combined with Googles push for Matter-compatible, Assistant-driven devices, led to a gradual pruning of Nests earliest products. Today, Nest is no longer the flagship brand for smart homes. Instead, its more of a subbrand within Googles hardware portfolio. Because technology is apparently obligated to continue to march on, Google says that the oldest Nest Thermostats are basically obsolete. Sure, theyll continue to worksort of. You can manually control the temperature on the thermostat, whichby the wayis also something you can do on much older thermostats. With the Nest, however, you just have to overlook the part about not connecting to the internet, which is pretty much the main reason you bought it in the first place. Just dont break things that work fine Look, I dont know what the lifespan should be for a smart thermostat, but I do know that for as long as it continues to operate, it should do the thing you were promised when you bought it. I get that there are reasons that companies end support for older devices. At some point, you cant continue to develop software for devices that dont have the hardware to run it. According to Google, It has become increasingly challenging to continue to update these products given the early hardware. The thing is, a thermostat doesnt really need updates. It doesnt need new software. It literally just needs to do the thing it did the day you bought it. Whichin this caseis to control your heat and air conditioning in the app. Thats the promise Nest sold from the beginning, and breaking that promise comes at a high cost. In fact, Id argue the cost is so high that breaking it is the one thing no company should ever do. Jason Aten This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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E-Commerce
Ads already follow you wherever you go. Theyre on your TV, your phone, your train careven on your airline tray table and escalator. Now, theyll soon be in your chatbot, too. OpenAI announced last week that it will begin selling ads in ChatGPT. The move opens up a potentially massive revenue source for OpenAIand is a huge threat to Googles world-dominating ad empire. Heres why. ChatGPT, Sell Me a Toaster For years, OpenAI has resisted the siren song of advertising and has kept its chatbot largely open to the world. Thats gone well for the company. Offering a massively valuable product for free has been, unsurprisingly, popular. ChatGPT now has a reported 900 million monthly users. Of those, 95% are on the companys Free or Go tiers, which means they either pay $8 per month for the service or nothing at all. Providing cutting-edge AI to a tenth of humanity, though, is exquisitely expensive: OpenAI expects to burn through $115 billion in the next few years. To raise that kind of money, OpenAI needs to prove that it can monetize its vast trove of free users. Advertising, traditionally, has been the way to make money from nonpaying eyeballs. Indeed, in its announcement, OpenAI confirmed that its ads will initially be limited to Free and Go users. They will appear below organic answers and be specifically identified as advertising. The company says that the content of ads wont determine the answers that ChatGPT givesif you ask it for a toaster recommendation, for example, it wont write glowingly about a toaster brand that happens to be an ad partner. But if you ask the bot how to fix your broken toasterand it turns out your current appliance is a lost causeChatGPT might present you with paid ads for a replacement. A Better Mailbox Showing contextual ads beside organic search results is hardly new: Thats been Googles business model for decades, and it makes the tech giant hundreds of billions per year. Whats different, though, is how OpenAI can target its ads. Matching ads to a specific user is hard. Google has traditionally done it by gathering vast troves of data about all of us, and then mining that data for insights on what we might buy. In some cases, its obvious what ad Google should show. If you search flights to Aruba, youre probably traveling to Aruba, and the company can profitably show you a bazillion ads for Aruba hotels, Aruba rental cars, and the like for the next several months. But more than half of Google queries are navigational. These are purely transactional phrases that people type into the search engine in order to find something else. Many more queries are short and ambiguous. Looking at my own recent Google search history, for example, I typed in queries including Sonicare skip slow start, Rancho San Ramon Community Park, and what minor American celebrities are big in Japan. Good luck figuring out what ads to serve me based on that. In contrast, when people chat with ChatGPT, they tend to do so for a long time. The average session with the chatbot reportedly lasts 12 minutes and 24 seconds. Thats long enough to exchange a lot of information. And all that information gives the bot a strong sense of what the user wantsor might want to buy. In a recent session with ChatGPT, for example, I had a detailed conversation about whether a specific piece of lumber was pressure-treated, and how this might affect my ability to use it in my laser cutter. From our long chat, the bot now knows the exact project Im working on (replacing a mailbox). If ads were live, it could use that context to try to sell me all manner of related things: better lumber, metal mailbox bases, construction adhesive, and the like. And it gets even better. ChatGPT knows Im building a mailbox. But with its Memory function, it remembers from our previous chats the exact model of laser cutter I have, where I live, and much else about me. That would potentially allow the bot to serve me ads not just for lumber, but also for lumber that works in my laser cutter, would hold up well to the climate in California where I live, and would be easy for me to work with, given my exceedingly limited patience and skill for woodworking. A Shot Across the Bow OpenAIs exquisite knowledge of its users needs means it can likely sell ChatGPT ads for a premium. And because so many people use the bot, its potential ad market is massive. That makes OpenAI a huge threat to Google, the dominant player in the digital advertising market. The search engine processes about 8.5 billion queries per day. Since the average person searches Google about four times per day, that means Google Search likely has around 2.5 billion active users. Thats roughly triple OpenAIs user base. But OpenAI is still growing aggressively. And again, the companys users spend far longer with ChatGPT than Googles users spend on its search engine: 12 minutes versus as little as five seconds for a Google search. The combination of a gigantic audience and lots of engagement timeplus a huge amount of targeting datameans OpenAI has all the tools it needs to threaten Googles ad dominance in very short order. And theres precedent for a new entrant to the ad world gaining ground quickly. In 2019, Amazon had only $12.63 billion in ad revenue. But 2024, that number swelled to $56.21 billion and is still growing. And thats with far fewer users than OpenAI. Make no mistake, then. OpenAIs announcement is a shot across Googles bow. The company says its ad program is still in a testing phase. But so was ChatGPT when the company launched it. That OpenAI product completely changed the fabric of the digital world, altering how artificial intelligence is built and sold. OpenAIs ads could soon do the same for the way its monetized.
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E-Commerce
CoreWeave and Nvidia announced Monday that the AI chipmaker has invested another $2 billion as part of a plan to accelerate the buildout of more than five gigawatts of artificial-intelligence (AI) factories by 2030. That’s on top of its previous $3.3 billion investment. CoreWeave is a cloud computing platform focused on artificial intelligence. According to a release from Nvidia, the chipmaker bought CoreWeave Class A common stock at $87.20 a share, which “reflects it’s confidence in CoreWeaves business, team and growth strategy as a cloud platform built on NVIDIA infrastructure.” The news sent shares of CoreWeave, Inc. (Nasdaq: CRWV) up 12% in Monday morning trading; at the time of this writing, in midday trading, it was trading up over 9%. “Demand for AI continues to grow exponentially and the need for compute has never been greater, the companies said in a joint statement. AI is entering its next frontier and driving the largest infrastructure buildout in human history, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, added. CoreWeaves deep AI factory expertise, platform software, and unmatched execution velocity are recognized across the industry. Together, were racing to meet extraordinary demand for NVIDIA AI factoriesthe foundation of the AI industrial revolution. The deal does two things: It gives CoreWeave “early access” to Nvidia’s new central processing unit (CPU) and other products; and pits Nvidia up against Intel and Advanced Micro Devices as direct competitors, according to a report from LinkedIn News. Coreweave financials CoreWeave became a publicly traded company in March, debuting on the Nasdaq exchangeafter raising billions, in part from Nvidia, per CNBC. In November, the company reported third-quarter 2025 earnings with revenue beating analyst expectations at $1.36 billion (versus $1.29 billion), but reported negative earnings per share (EPS) of 22 cents. Operating income was also down 56% to $51.9 million. That, in addition to high infrastructure costs, third-party partner delays, and high debt, caused its share price to drop at the time.
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E-Commerce
For weeks, the leaders of Minnesotas most prominent businesses have remained tight-lipped as thousands of ICE agents have flooded the Twin Cities, where those agents have raided residential neighborhoods, detained employees from local businesses, and taken multiple schoolchildren in broad daylight. Now, over the weekend, more than 60 Minnesota-based CEOs finally spoke out against ICE in a brief collective letter. The 200-word letter was released on January 25 by Minnesotas Chamber of Commerce. It came the day after a U.S. Border Patrol officer shot and killed Minneapolis resident and ICU nurse Alex Pretti, and weeks after the death of Minneapolis writer Renee Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent on January 7. In the letter, the business leaders call for an immediate deescalation of tensions, and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions. But, for many Minnesotans, this response is too little, too late. A culture of corporate silence Just a few years ago, it was fairly commonplace for major companies to speak out about social justiceto varying degrees of actual commitment and impact. In the summer of 2020, during President Trumps first term, Minnesota-based companies including General Mills, Target, Best Buy, Cargill, UnitedHealth Group, 3M, and Land OLakes all offered statements in the immediate wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. But now, during Trumps second term, corporate silence has become the norm as companies opt to remain mute on critical issues rather than attracting the Trump administrations ire. Until recently, the above companies have failed to speak up amidst large-scale ICE raids in their home state. Earlier this month, Fast Company writer Joe Berkowitz reached out to all of them regarding ICEs presence in Minneapolis, and received radio silence. Meanwhile, small businesses in the community were actively responding to the situation by condemning ICE and setting up fundraisers for affected residents. Now, though, it seems that major Minnesotan companies finally feel that silence is no longer a viable path forward. Their new letter was signed by CEOs from all of the aforementioned companies, as well as others like Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, Mayo Clinic, the Minnesota Vikings, Xcel Energy, and more. “The business community in Minnesota prides itself in providing leadership and solving problems to ensure a strong and vibrant state,” the letter starts. “The recent challenges facing our state have created widespread disruption and tragic loss of life.” It continues, “In this difficult moment for our community, we call for peace and focused cooperation among local, state and federal leaders to achieve a swift and durable solution that enables families, businesses, our employees, and communities across Minnesota to resume our work to build a bright and prosperous future. Notably, the letter never actually references ICE or U.S. Border Patrol by name, and only acknowledges Pretti’s death as “yesterday’s tragic news.” Too little, too late So far, some commenters online have expressed their gratitude to these companies for coming forward. But the overwhelming response has been dominated by people who are incredulous at the statements timingand its lack of direct language. Id argue this isnt even breaking silence, one comment under a post from The Minnesota Star Tribune reads. This statement essentially says nothing. They are just speaking out to avoid criticism. A second comment noted, “It reads with the subtext ‘please lets all calm down so we can make money again’ PASS.” And a third user added, Yall have the resources to do more than write a letter. Pause operations for a week, pay your employees anyway, go to DC and take an actual risk. Small businesses stood 10 toes down and lost revenue on Friday while yall stayed open. Leadership isnt just about bts conversations . . . its also about using your leverage. So use it.
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E-Commerce
The Wienermobiles are coming back for a bite at the Brickyard in May, giving them another chance to relish the spotlight of racing’s biggest weekend. Oscar Mayer announced Sunday all six of its famed street-ready vehicles will compete for the second straight year on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s historic 2.5-mile oval. The Wienie 500 is scheduled for May 22 during the track’s annual Carburation Day festivities. Last year’s race was such a hit, organizers wanted to give fans a second round to savor the flavor of a light-hearted competition just two days before IndyCar’s marquis race the Indianapolis 500. The presentation will have a familiar look for fans who watched last year’s inaugural race. Each Wienermobile will feature toppings representing an American regional favorite while carrying carry custom decals. Drivers will don Hotdogger racing suits while the iconic Wiener Song plays and the champ drives into wieners circle. Slaw Dog, which represents the Southeast, will try to prove it is beefy enough to defend last year’s crown. Four other regional favorites also are expected to return Chi Dog (Midwest), New York Dog (East), Chili Dog (South) and Seattle Dog (Northwest). But the Sonoran Dog may be replaced after failing to cut the mustard in 2025. Fans can choose the final entrant from a menu of seven possibilities, including the Sonoran Dog, by visiting Instagram in the first Pick Your Dog Wienie 500 bracket. Updates will be provided on the Instagram account or on TikTok. The response to the first Wienie 500 was overwhelming, and we heard the fans loud and clear that they were hungry for more, Kelsey Rice, Oscar Mayer brand communications director said in a statement. This year, were supercharging the experience, delivering an even bigger, bolder and more unforgettable event that puts the fans at the forefront. With amplified engagement, intensified rivalries and more surprises in store, were giving the people what they want an unparalleled live experience that will leave them craving more.
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E-Commerce
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